I’ve been project-leading a big undertaking at work recently – the purpose of which is to streamline our methods of communication with a third-party provider who is integral to the PocketSmith product. It’s a really exciting development for me to take charge with, and once it’s done it will be a huge efficiency-boost for my team: at the moment, we’re only able to have one team-member manage the communication with the vendor, and it involves a ridiculous amount of copy-pasting of text and repetitious tasks in several platforms.
Once I’m done, we’ll have streamlined our communication so that we can manage everything in our own helpdesk software and all members of the team will be able to manage their own communication streams. We will no longer lose information because we haven’t received an email or notification, and we’ll be able to improve the experience for our users.
I’m building the project within the Node JS environment of our Slack bot (aka, Rupert) and making heavy use of APIs for both Slack and our Help Scout helpdesk. Our vendor doesn’t have API access to their own helpdesk, so I’m using Nightmare JS to access their interface and interact with it.
Before I started, I documented the whole project then broke that down into smaller, more achievable sub-projects which was a really helpful exercise, and one I keep updating as I make adjustments to the project parameters (or libraries).
It has been really delightful getting my teeth into some code again – especially knowing how helpful this will be once it’s completely finished. I’m about a quarter of the way through and already we are seeing improvements! The biggest challenge is really finding time to dedicate to the project, but the further I get through it, the more time I’ll have available which is super cool!